The oldest curriculum drafted for Leiden university in 1575 closely followed that outlined by Ramus himself 20 years earlier. But from 1582 onward, after the arrival in Leiden of the great humanist scholar, Justus Lipsius, modern textbooks were swept aside in favour of unmediated study of classical authors (section 2.ii). The extermination of Leiden’s Ramist tradition is personified in the figure of Rudolph Snellius. In Marburg before 1575, his teaching aroused such enthusiasm that his former students and colleagues spent years assembling his draft material into a nine-volume, 3,000-page encyclopaedia published in Frankfurt in 1596. In Leiden after 1582, however, his preferred teaching methods were proscribed and he languished for twenty years as an extraordinary professor of mathematics, belittled by his humanist colleagues, and publishing nothing under his own name (section 2.iv). As a consequence, Leiden and the other Dutch universities became net importers of philosophy textbooks for five decades, producing very few of their own and relying instead on the key figure of the central European post-Ramist tradition: Bartholomaeus Keckermann (section 2.ii). Throughout this entire period, Leiden—contrary to widely accepted myth—grew slowly, remained relatively small, and was marginal to international Reformed student travel, until the Twelve Years Truce in 1609 began a growth spurt accelerated by the Thirty Years War after 1618 (section 2.i).
IEEE AP-S Symposium Student Travel Grant